


Marry Me

by iphis17



Category: Skulduggery Pleasant - Derek Landy
Genre: Age Difference, Emilie Autumn - Freeform, F/F, F/M, M/M, POV Third Person Limited, Queer Characters, Rape, Roman Catholicism, Self-Harm, Songfic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-06-11
Updated: 2013-06-07
Packaged: 2017-12-14 05:43:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/833415
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iphis17/pseuds/iphis17
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She's fourteen, he's considerably older. She likes girls and he likes power. She hates him and he loves her father. </p><p>Theirs is not a happy marriage.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written on the seventh day of June in the year 2013.
> 
>  _"Marry me," he said..._  
>  \- Marry Me, Emilie Autumn.

The organist that plays at the wedding has eyes like smoke and ashes rising from the flames of a fireplace, and is utterly beautiful, with her hair framing her face like she's a work of art. Her fingers work over the keys nimbly, splendidly fast, and when Marianne watches that, all she can think about is what else those fingers could do.

Marianne does that a lot. Thinks about sex at all the wrong times. She's fourteen and kind of uncertain about the world, except kind of not as well, because sometimes everything's just so clear and she has no idea why everyone else doesn't _get it_. Like, she's got no idea how not to desperately offend her father (Thurid Guild, politician), but most of the time when she sees girls around her age, she knows she's attracted to them. What she doesn't know is why she can't get her parents to understand that.

Relatedly, what she _really_ doesn't know is why she's getting married today.

Her shoes are too small for her. She's been outgrowing them at a rate of a pair per month, recently, and last night when she'd tried these on, they were okay. They pull her toes backwards now, make her bones hurt when she takes a step. She doesn't mind too much, in the scheme of things, since she'll probably never have to wear them after today. That's the thing about children's clothing - it's made to be replaced. She doesn't really mind that her attire feels like all kinds of impermanence.

It just feels odd that she's being handed off to some guy a few hundred times her age, who she's never really talked to and she doubts she ever will, when she hasn't even stopped growing.

Well, she knows the reasoning behind it like rote. Her father's explained it enough times, getting more convoluted and confusing with each telling, like the truth of it is running away from him. Remus Crux is the Sanctuary's head detective, and a great friend to her father, and he's powerful and rich and while the same is thought to be true of the Grand Mage's own family, the truth is that all the power in the world isn't quite enough to get them from meal to meal. (Thurid Guild gambles. No one is meant to know of it, but Marianne's worked it out from the smell on his coat when he comes home late and her mother is drinking away whatever's left of their money.)

And one day Remus Crux made the proposal (to Thurid, though, since Marianne's nothing more than property) and the bride price was good, and here she is in the church, stabbing her finger on a thorn left on the stem of a rose in her bouquet (peach for the closing of a deal) and praying to a God that up until now she has only nominally believed in that things will turn out to not be as bad as she's expecting them to.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written on the seventh day of June in the year 2013.
> 
>  _Through his rotten teeth, bad breath, and then..._  
>  \- Marry Me, Emilie Autumn.

The service drags on into eternity. She looks around as she is apt to, and the man she is to marry does not seem to notice. One of the altar boys kneeling across from her has an erection, and she tries not to laugh as she watches him attempt to hide it behind his container of incense. The musicians have retreated to their seats, and Marianne is left to wonder what her life would have been like if she'd been born with a penis.

Would she still be marrying Thurid? she wonders as she follows the movement of the thurible. Would she still be standing here feeling small and scared and insignificant, about to be married off to the man with the goatee? Or would it be a woman of some description, or no one at all? Would they have pressed her into work?

She hopes that's not the case. She wouldn't mind working, as it is, and to find out that she is only being prodded and poked down this road due to the shape of her genitalia would be a decided disappointment.

It's too late for alternate realities to be of much comfort to her, though, because as long as the time she spends in the church feels, it is over far too soon for her liking, and she catches one last glance of the beautiful organist and the embarrassed thurifer before she is walking out into the world with her husband. He does not hold her arm but instead strides before her - she is short, even compared to him.

They bundle themselves into a car that she absently reimagines as a carriage drawn by horses, and in silence they drive a ways out to his estate. He lives shrouded in safety, and only the most elegant of obscurity.

He sits with his legs spread apart, limbs sprawled over the aged leather of the seat. She looks at him from the corner of her eye, through the scratchy tulle of her veil, and shrinks even closer to the tinted glass of the window. She can only see the man's reflection in it, and so she doesn't bother to look.

Despite the distance, the journey feels too short. She's been distracting herself with the movement of the vehicle on the road, the way it rocks up and down, and the feeling of the cuts she's digging into her fingers with her rose-thorns still, an attempt to get herself some kind of wet. It will help make this easier, she hopes, making her body ready for things she knows her mind will never want of this man.

So she stumbles a little awkwardly as she gets out of the car and her husband does not brace her, only walks on ahead as the servants scurry around to welcome him home and make everything to his ideas of perfection. She feels ignored and entirely unsure of her purpose, and so she just trails along after him like some kind of pet.


End file.
